Real Steel

CFO of the largest steel company in the world. Heir to $16 billion. Cold and calculating? We find out on the squash courts of a members-only club in London

CFO of the largest steel company in the world. Heir to $16 billion. You might imagine Aditya Mittal to be a cold, calculating character. On the squash courts of a members-only club in London, we find out

The Bath & Racquets Club lies behind an unassuming yet stately façade on Brook’s Mews in London’s posh Mayfair district. To swing a racket, work out, take a steam or get a massage here, you’ll need letters of approval from two of the B&R’s elite members, an allocation on a waiting list and an unspecified amount of time to get a response. Which means if your last squash game was at the YMCA a reasonable tube ride from your flat in Islington, you’ll be waiting a while. Members’ commutes here are more a chauffeured ride in a shiny grey Mercedes from a multimillion-pound mansion in Chelsea.

I use the example of the YMCA because that’s the last place I set eyes on a squash court, over two decades ago, in my blue-collar hometown in Canada, and have never played the sport. I use the example of a shiny grey Mercedes coming from Chelsea because that’s how Aditya Mittal, the scion and Chief Financial Officer of ArcelorMittal, the largest steel company in the world, gets here, driven by his friendly yet physically imposing wheel-man called Louis.

The Calcutta-born son of multibillionaire Lakshmi Mittal, Aditya is an avid squash player, and today, this super-rich member of this super exclusive club has invited me for a game. It’s a frightening invitation if you grew up in the Eighties and had even a cursory interest in popular cinema, where squash was a game for moneyed alpha males with brains like microprocessors, channelling the stress of directing more cash-flow than you’ll ever see in your life before their breakfasts are fully digested. Greedmonger Gordon Gekko battering doe-eyed day-trader Bud Fox at New York’s Wyatt Club in Wall Street comes to mind. But Aditya isn’t like that, pal. With his wiry frame, a slick haircut belied by a bit of a rooster-tail sticking up at the back and a laugh fired with the enthusiasm of a child on a rollercoaster, Aditya’s more Peter Pan than Gordon Gekko. Outside court no 2, as he pushes a button on the automatic ball warmer, Aditya gives me my first bit of squash advice; advice that would have been far more ominous if his friendly timbre had more a Gordon-Gekko rasp: “Dave, never start a game with cold balls.”

If there’s any prurience there, it’s mine, not Aditya’s. Spend some time with the 38-year-old and you’re likely to describe him as “polite”, or “decent”. Even if you’ve read about his aggressive business moves over the years, in person, he comes off as quaint as he does intelligent. Mittal Jr attended the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and was “out of there in three years.” In 1996, he graduated magna cum laude, no small achievement, and one that can’t be bartered for with daddy’s silver spoon collection. This was a time when people of Aditya’s young age and intelligence were flocking to places like Palo Alto for the IT and dot-com booms. Aditya’s grandfather suggested he get out of the family business altogether and try something more modern, but after a year of investment banking in America, Aditya ended up saddling himself to a steel industry in severe decline. As head of Mergers & Acquisitions at Mittal Steel, he rode out the crisis not by averting risk, but by going on a buying spree.

Earlier in the day, once I’d cheated a chilly London December for the echo chamber of the Berkeley House foyer, I collected my visitor’s badge, cleared security and, after being announced by a wood-sprite of a receptionist at the company’s seventh-floor office, was shown to Aditya’s workspace, across the hall from his father’s.

Aditya’s is not the den of a steel tycoon. The wall-to-wall carpeting is beige. There are pictures of his children on a shelf beneath a painting better suited to the waiting room. It looks like a bank manager’s office. Aditya takes great pleasure, and expects me to take equal pleasure, in the cinnamon-shaved ArcelorMittal logo in my cappuccino froth and, of all the professional subjects we cover, he speaks most enthusiastically about a new girder meant to make exposed steel at airports easier on the eyes. “I call it the Angelina,” he says, producing a 12-inch model of a Freudian-red I-beam with a series of, well, sure, lusciously shaped bits of negative space. It takes me a moment to see the spaces between the stress-distributing curves as sets of pouty lips, but he notices when I do. “Now you get it?” he asks, smiling.

“Got it.”

Aditya’s attraction to the steel-making process is obvious. He speaks of childhood visits to his father’s plant in Indonesia, where he grew up, as Indian kids might describe their first time seeing Sachin bat. “It was fascinating just to see how the steel was processed and made,” he says, interlocking his long fingers as he speaks, rocking in his leather swivel chair. “I mean, if you ever visit a steel plant, you will find it incredible.” Maybe I would. But what fascinates me now is the glint in Aditya’s eyes as he talks about his preferred commodity. If you take a gondola up a ski slope in Switzerland, he says, the cable is probably made of Mittal steel. There are 14,000 tonnes of Mittal’s “freedom beams” in One World Trade Center in New York. Anish Kapoor’s Orbit Tower, built for the 2012 London Olympics? Mittal steel. If you open a bottle of champagne, anywhere in the world, chances are you’ve twisted a muselet of Mittal steel. It’s a doting look Aditya has about steel. It’s a look of love at first sight sustained. Why can’t I love anything like that?

We hadn’t planned on having lunch at Nobu, but it’s a hell of a second choice.

Prolonging the spirit of squash at the Bath & Racquets, Aditya had suggested we eat at Harry’s Bar: Like the B&R and the infamous Annabel’s, Harry’s is part of the same circuit of cordoned upper-crust clubs done up by the late Mark Birley, Mayfair’s most celebrated dead snob. “But then I realized before you came,” Aditya had said in his office, “we need to wear jackets and ties at Harry’s Bar.” Once Aditya’s head of communications, Nicola, suggested the clemently cravat-free alternative of Nobu, Aditya was already picking at his Windsor knot, quick to explain, “I don’t usually wear a tie to the office.”

Shirt collar unbuttoned at Nobu, a barely touched bamboo cup of sake to the side of his triple serving of Wagyu beef, Aditya tells me about his other great love: his wife, Megha, who he met during his time at Wharton. He says that once he’d “become friendly with her,” he called her, “and she said, ‘Can you hold? I’m on the other line’.” Aditya laughs. “I was holding for 45 minutes, then I realized she wasn’t coming back. She literally took the phone, left it on the bed and walked out. She was going somewhere, but it was her way of saying, ‘no interest’.” Ouch.

Aditya may have left his hometown of Calcutta when he was less than a year old, but it was there that he returned in 1998, once he’d won Megha over and got her to marry him. Lakshmi rented out the Victoria Monument for the ceremony and Shah Rukh Khan took home a rumoured £300,000 to dance at the reception. “It was a traditional Indian wedding,” says Aditya, straight-faced, as if dancing Bollywood superstars were as common a wedding fixture as cake.

The next milestone date in Aditya’s life would have to be June 26, 2006, when he became the biggest business news story in the world, credited with brokering what Goldman bankers still call the biggest business deal of the decade. Merging his father’s company with Luxembourg-based Arcelor, Mittal Steel’s annual production of 10 million tonnes would throttle past the 100-million-tonne mark, making it the biggest steel company in the world, three times bigger than second-ranked Nippon Steel. As of January 2014, with an output of 120 million tonnes, ArcelorMittal doubles the 60 million tonnes of India’s entire steel industry. I’m so caught up in trying to get my head around the numbers of this global empire with operations in 26 countries that I almost forget Aditya is an Indian citizen. And yet, so far, his company has been absent from his home country.

The Mittals have two projects planned, one in Jharkhand and one in Karnataka, but Aditya isn’t sentimental or nationalistic about doing business in India. “I don’t think that has been our driving force,” he says, “to do things in India because we are Indian. At the end of the day I am part of ArcelorMittal and I am answerable to the shareholders… if India is part of that strategy, great. If, for whatever reason, it doesn’t work for ArcelorMittal, then it doesn’t.”

Aditya may be indifferent about his multibillion-dollar empire coming to India, but his dad has appeared in the international press recently, sounding frustrated about how slow the cogs are turning within India’s federal and state governments. For the moment though, Aditya and I have other business to discuss.

Before he gets into his silver Merc with doors as heavy as a six-tonne British tank – opened by Louis, who I’m sure Aditya wouldn’t want me to describe as a bodyguard – he suggests a squash rematch the next time he visits Mumbai, and I decide to sniff around my neighbourhood for a squash court when I get back. It’s a stupid impulse, but for every echelon that separates our lives, for every vague promise a prominent subject gives a journalist after an interview, Aditya seems like the kind of guy who might actually show up one day with a racquet and just want to play squash. He’s just down-to-earth like that. And in steamy Mumbai, there’s no need for a machine; the balls will already be warm.